FYI: I think Bill makes a good point WRT the ChangeLogs.
Joe's script might be useful to us too.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: Attn New Committers
Date: Sat, 14 Jun 2008 22:42:42 +0200
From: Ruediger Pluem <rpluem@apache.org>
To: APR Developer List <dev@apr.apache.org>
References: <4854282B.9050802@rowe-clan.net>



On 06/14/2008 10:20 PM, William A. Rowe, Jr. wrote:
> Please don't do this;
> 
> -----------
> Revision 663845 - Directory Listing
> Modified Fri Jun 6 07:39:52 2008 UTC (8 days, 12 hours ago) by henryjen
> 
> backport r663342 from trunk
> -----------
> 
> Such commit messages aren't legible when comparing a branch to trunk, 
> please
> repeat the purpose of the commit in the log message for the backport!

There is an IMHO pretty cool script from Joe Orton that is very helpful
for backporting trunk revisions. It creates a file with all the original
commit messages that could be used as commit message for the backport
plus it adds the numbers of the revisions that get backported. It
can be found here:

http://people.apache.org/~jorton/svn.merge

Regards

Rüdiger